Obama: “The rituals of Hajj and Eid-ul-Adha both serve as reminders of the shared Abrahamic roots of three of the world’s major religions”

I’m a bit late with this, but it is still worth noting. The Islamic Feast of Eid al-Adha commemorates the end of the pilgrimage to Mecca, the Hajj, and Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son — Ishmael in the Muslim version.

In thinking of Abraham, most Americans think of the Biblical figure. In Genesis 22:15-18, Abraham is rewarded for his faith and told he will become a blessing to the nations: “by your descendants shall all the nations of the earth bless themselves, because you have obeyed my voice.”

But the Muslim audiences that Obama addresses here do not read Genesis. They read the Koran, in which Allah says that Abraham is an “excellent example” for the believers when he tells his pagan family and people that “there has arisen, between us and you, enmity and hatred for ever, unless ye believe in Allah and Him alone” (60:4). The same verse relates that Abraham is not an excellent example when he tells his father, “I will pray for forgiveness for you.”

Thus the Koran, in its picture of Abraham, the man Obama invokes as a symbol of the common elements of the three faiths, holds up hatred as exemplary, while belittling the virtue of forgiveness. Obama therefore reinforces a worldview that takes for granted the legitimacy of everlasting enmity between Muslims and non-Muslims — and does so while attempting to build bridges between Muslims and non-Muslims.

This demonstrates once again how crucial it is for American policymakers to have a detailed understanding of Islam’s theological and cultural frame of reference, and of the actual teachings of the Koran. For lack of this understanding, careless statements continue to be made, and policy errors keep multiplying.

“Obama greets Muslim pilgrims,” by Foon Rhee for the Boston Globe, November 25 (thanks to all who sent this in):

President Obama continued his outreach to the world’s Muslims today, sending greetings to pilgrims to Mecca.He also noted that his administration is assisting Saudi authorities in preventing the spread of swine flu.

“Michelle and I would like to send our best wishes to all those performing Hajj this year, and to Muslims in America and around the world who are celebrating Eid-ul-Adha. The rituals of Hajj and Eid-ul-Adha both serve as reminders of the shared Abrahamic roots of three of the world’s major religions,” Obama said in a statement.

“During Hajj, the world’s largest and most diverse gathering, three million Muslims from all walks of life – including thousands of American Muslims – will stand in prayer on Mount Arafat. The following day, Muslims around the world will celebrate Eid-ul-Adha and distribute food to the less fortunate to commemorate Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son out of obedience to God,” the president added in the statement, translated on the White House website into Arabic, Persian, Dari, Urdu, Pashto, Russian, and French.

“This year, I am pleased that the Department of Health and Human Services has partnered with the Saudi Health Ministry to prevent and limit the spread of H1N1 during Hajj. Cooperating on combating H1N1 is one of the ways we are implementing my administration’s commitment to partnership in areas of mutual interest.

“On behalf of the American people, we would like to extend our greetings during this Hajj season – Eid Mubarak.”

The story begins at Michigan State University with a mechanical engineering professor named Indrek Wichman.

Wichman sent an e-mail to the Muslim Student’s Association.

The e-mail was in response to the students’ protest of the Danish cartoons that portrayed the Prophet Muhammad as a terrorist.

The group had complained the cartoons were ‘hate speech’

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Enter Professor Wichman.

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In his e-mail, he said the following:

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Dear Muslim Association,

As a professor of Mechanical Engineering here at MSU I intend to protest your protest.

I am offended not by cartoons, but by more mundane things like beheadings of civilians, cowardly attacks on public buildings, suicide murders, murders of Catholic priests (the latest in Turkey), burnings of Christian churches, the continued persecution of Coptic Christians in Egypt, the imposition of Sharia law on non-Muslims, the rapes of Scandinavian girls and women (called ‘whores’ in your culture), the murder of film directors in Holland, and the rioting and looting in Paris France.

This is what offends me, a soft-spoken person and academic, and many, many of my colleagues..I counsel you dissatisfied, aggressive, brutal, and uncivilized slave-trading Muslims to be very aware of this as you proceed with your infantile ‘protests.’

If you do not like the values of the West – see the 1st Amendment – you are free to leave. I hope for God’s sake that most of you choose that option.

Please return to your ancestral homelands and build them up yourselves instead of troubling Americans.

Cordially,

I. S. Wichman

Professor of Mechanical Engineering

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As you can imagine,

the Muslim group at the university didn’t like this too well.

They’re demanding that Wichman be reprimanded and the university impose mandatory diversity training for faculty.

And mandate a seminar on hate and discrimination for all freshmen..

Now the local chapter of CAIR has jumped into the fray .

CAIR, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, apparently doesn’t believe that the good professor

had the right to express his opinion..

==========

For its part, the university is standing its ground in support of Professor Wichman,

saying the e-mail was private, and they don’t intend to publicly condemn his remarks.

Posted By David Horowitz On November 26, 2009 @ 12:05 am In FrontPage | 45 Comments

On Monday night Bill O’Reilly had a representative of the traitor class in his cross-hairs, an episode he re-visited Tuesday night. The traitor class is easily defined as people who can’t identify a self-declared enemy of the United States even after he has killed 3,000 innocent people in an act of self-described holy war and is prepared to provide his talents and services gratis to help the enemy combatant attack this own country.

Scott Fenstermaker is an attorney for Covington Burling, a white shoe law firm which has provided millions of dollars in pro bono legal work to Gitmo[1] terrorists. A Covington partner is the brother of Weather terrorist Kathy Boudin, and the lawyer organizing the Gitmo pro bono defense team is family friend and political comrade Michael Ratner[2], head of the terrorist-supporting Center for Constitutional Rights[3], who has spent his life defending America’s enemies and serving anti-American causes.

If you can’t describe the 3000 innocent victims of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed [4]as “murdered” and your first move is to describe your own government’s case as propaganda, and you are devising a case to “justify” the evil deed your client has committed and won’t say that you would be upset if your country were to lose the case, and also if you’re a Jew and don’t have any problem defending an Islamic Nazi who beheaded Daniel Pearl after forcing him to say “I’m a Jew, I’m a Jew” — there can be only one explanation. You believe in the justification defense you are preparing, you think America and the Jews are guilty and deserve what they get, and you are a traitor.

And much worse — only words are inadequate to describe just how low on the human scale you have sunk.

“Green energy” is proving to be no miracle solution to the nation’s monumental unemployment problems, and it is doing little to help the economy emerge from its deepest recession in decades, economists say.

A large part of this year’s $786 billion stimulus bill was devoted to green or renewable energy projects, with President Obama, Democratic legislators and their environmental allies repeatedly promising that the money would be used to create an army of home weatherizers, wind-turbine factory jobs and other employment opportunities that would help put to work the nearly 8 million people who have lost jobs during the recession.

The president and his allies have asserted that as many as 5 million jobs would be created by spending $150 billion over the next decade on new technologies such as solar and tidal power while retrofitting buildings and residences to make them more energy-efficient.

“We know the jobs of the 21st century will be created in developing alternative energy,” the president said as he campaigned last year. “The question is whether these jobs will be created in America … or overseas.”

But the reality is that after a big dose of spending in the stimulus bill, no more than 100,000 or so jobs have been created, economists say, and the prospects are for only modest growth in alternative energy jobs for years to come.

“This is not the spark” that will pull the economy out of recession and put it in a lasting expansion that creates millions of jobs, said Rajeev Dhawan, director of the Economic Forecasting Center at Georgia State University. “This is not the solution to the current big unemployment problem.”

Green-energy industries other than wind and hydropower remain mostly in the experimental stages and are not proven enough technologically or economically to be instrumental in pulling the economy out of recession and putting millions of people to work like the Internet boom of the 1990s or the housing boom of the early 2000s, he said.

“We need to put 7.3 million people back to work, and none of these ideas can make a dent of more than a few hundred thousand at best, and then after only a long gestation time,” Mr. Dhawan said.

While green jobs likely are a wave of the future, economists say, most of them will require high levels of education and skills, and they will not be plentiful enough to take care of the millions of unemployed construction workers, retail sales clerks and factory workers who need jobs right now.

Many green industries were set back by the deep recession, despite being showered with additional government subsidies. Ethanol plants struggled to stay afloat after the big decline in oil and gas prices last year, which made it harder to compete with traditional energy sources.

Meanwhile, other projects targeted for funding in the stimulus, such as tidal power and carbon capture, still are not technologically feasible or do not make economic sense at today’s energy prices, even with the subsidies.

“For all the talk about green-job creation, there’s an unavoidable problem with renewable-energy technologies and the policies that promote them: From an economic standpoint, they’re big losers,” said Max Schulz, an analyst at the Manhattan Institute, a free-market think tank.

“Renewables can’t produce the large volumes of useful, reliable energy that our economy needs at attractive prices. Government subsidizes renewables because — all things being equal — the free market won’t,” he said. Even before the stimulus was enacted, solar and wind projects received more than 16 times the subsidies given to nuclear, coal or oil, and yet still provided only a tiny fraction of the nation’s energy, according to the Energy Information Administration.

Mr. Schulz said green-economy advocates use a kind of “fuzzy math” when counting the number of jobs created. While the number of core green jobs such as environmental engineers and wind-turbine and solar-panel factory workers is small, environmental groups and subsidized industries add in support staff such as accountants, computer programmers, sales representatives and truck drivers who deliver the products to users.

“No real standards exist for what constitutes a green job, so these numbers are fuzzy,” Mr. Schulz said. “Work in an energy-intensive smelting plant producing steel for a wind turbine, and you might wind up in the green-jobs column, despite the belching pollution.”

Determining the number of green jobs created since February is difficult since the economy is still losing more than 200,000 jobs a month, according to economists and the Labor Department’s monthly jobs figures. The department does not directly track or even define what green jobs are, but economists who have attempted to make estimates say they probably number in the hundreds of thousands, not millions.

The administration’s tracking system claims that the stimulus has saved or created more than 640,000 jobs but does not specify how many of those are “green jobs.” Most appear to be in state and local health care and education. Reports from states and contractors have been riddled with mistakes and overestimates, the Government Accountability Office said in testimony Thursday.

A study for the National Governors Association by Collaborative Economics consulting group found that in 2007, just before the recession started, states such as Maryland and California had green jobs numbering from about 11,000 to 110,000 apiece, suggesting a national total of between 500,000 and 1 million. Jobs covered by the study were in a variety of areas from energy generation and efficiency to manufacturing and agriculture and offered salaries ranging from $123,650 for environmental engineers to $27,830 for shipping clerks.

The administration has pointed to studies by the Center for American Progress, the U.S. Conference of Mayors and other groups in making its predictions. Conservative critics have countered with studies showing that, even if the government programs create some jobs, those are more than offset by job losses in traditional energy sectors that are displaced by the renewable projects.

One conclusion derived from most of the studies is that the cost per job created is large. A study by the United Nations found that renewable energy projects such as solar are less efficient and more labor intensive than traditional energy, generating as many as nine jobs for each megawatt of electricity produced, compared with one job at existing coal- and gas-fired power plants.

But the cost per job can exceed $700,000, according to a study of Spain’s experiment with green jobs frequently cited by conservative groups.

Despite the disappointing performance, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. — the administration’s point man in pushing for green jobs — proclaimed last month that the U.S. can achieve a “recovery through retrofit” by just adding funds and incentives.

He proffered a report claiming that the main obstacle to creating millions of jobs for people retrofitting homes is a lack of training and financing. Labor unions, including the Service Employees International Union, have started job-training programs to support the administration’s efforts and stand to gain from further funding for the programs.

But economists say retrofitting homes, in the deepest recession since World War II, is a low priority for consumers, who are struggling with falling wages and hours, cutbacks in credit and more than one in 10 workers out of jobs.

Hard times have forced consumers to focus on necessities such as food and housing, and most do not have the financial means or inclination to begin major home-renovation projects, economists say. In fact, spending at hardware and home-improvement stores has been one of the weakest areas of retail sales throughout the recession, with sales down 13 percent in the past year.

Economists say lawmakers should be cautious about spending more money to create jobs.

About 3 percent of the first stimulus bill, or $27 billion, was funneled into transportation projects – not enough to prevent more than 1 million construction jobs from being eliminated in the past year.

“The fastest way to employ people is to start paving roads in local neighborhoods,” said Mr. Dhawan. “Put the money into projects that can start breaking ground in three days.”

But a survey by the Transportation Construction Coalition this month showed that 44 percent of road and transit contractors expect to lay off more permanent employees this year, despite receiving stimulus funds. The group is now pushing for additional funding, this time through reauthorization of the federal highway program, and reportedly is getting a hearing from House Democratic leaders.

President Obama is demanding that in connection with the terrorists for Gilad trade, which is being made with Hamas, Israel release an additional 1,000 terrorists as a ‘gesture’.

Arutz Sheva is reporting that President Obama is demanding that in connection with the terrorists for Gilad trade, which is being made with Hamas, Israel release an additional 1,000 terrorists as a ‘gesture’ to ‘moderate’ ‘Palestinian’ President Mahmoud Abbas Abu Mazen.

In response to U.S. demands that Israel free an additional 1,000-some terrorists as a “gesture” to Palestinian Authority chief Mahmoud Abbas, Lieberman said that previous releases of Fatah terrorists “have not proven themselves. The Olmert administration did this several times and it did not work, and we do not plan to allow it to happen,” Lieberman said.

Recall that Obama had — handed him, like so much else, on a platter by Bush — Israeli / Palestinian Authority negotiations all ready to roll, indeed already underway, ready to be, possibly, further advanced under U.S. sponsorship. Granted they were unlikely, for a number of reasons, to be terribly successful, but that’s hardly unusual or unprecedented!

The Five Obama Fails

The Obama Administration burst onto the presidency with a historic wealth of good will, hope and change. It is now marked by one failure after another. Unfortunately, these failures are not without costs. The heavy burden is born by consumers, taxpayers and to generations yet to come. Nearly one year later we have an economy heading in the wrong direction, unemployment rising, a deficit that will double, banks failing, a war command which is virtually ignored, 911 terrorists given all the rights at a civil trial and an Administration hell bent on destroying rather than “reforming” the world’s best health system. Not a bad day for an experienced community organizer.

1)Bank Bailout. The banks were bailed out to the tune of trillions of dollars with no oversight. The result: Banks continue to fail all over the country and lenders are not making any commercial loans, causing more business failures. Obama’s score? Fail.

2)Auto Bailout. GM was given billions of dollars and the government hand picked its board of directors. Result, GM is still losing billions each year. A simple bankruptcy would have allowed GM to emerge with leveled books, without the need to have invested a single dime of taxpayer money.

3)Cap and Tax. This boondoggle is more commonly known by the misleading name “Cap and Trade”. This scheme caps all CO2 emissions at a level 83% below the current level of emissions and further punitively taxes any additional CO2 emissions. Even the left leaning Brookings Institute study predicted dramatic job losses, particularly in certain energy industries, of between 35-40% as soon as 2025. I’m guessing this legislation was the brainchild of China, as there is no better way to encourage the few American manufacturers we still have in this country to pack up and manufacture overseas.

This discourages manufacturers from expanding their companies. Not a great idea in the midst of a global recession. This will not only be a jobs killer, it will be a huge tax to the consumers who will have this tax burden passed on to them in higher consumer costs. Trucking, flights, gas, electric and everything else that is moved or manufactured will go up in price. Obama fail.

4) Health Care reform. According to a Kaiser Foundation study, 89% of Americans are very satisfied with their current insurance plans. Creating a government subsidized plan that will now compete with private insurers is not competition at all. It will destroy private insurers until only the taxpayer subsidized government option is left standing. We all know how successful other government run programs are: Social Security: failing, Medicare: failing, post office: failing, Fannie Mae: failing, GM: failing, bank bailout plan: failing, creating more jobs after trillion in “stimulus”; failing, even the Obama touted, but poorly planned, Cash for Clunkers ran out of money unexpectedly in the first week.

Obama said he would veto any health care reform bill which added to the deficit and yet he still explains the bill that’s working it way through congress will insure an extra 40 million people without a loss in quality or increasing costs. Was I the only one he saw the Wizard of Oz and the fraudulent wizard behind the curtain? “Nothing to see here.” How exactly do costs for insuring an extra 40 million people not increase costs to the taxpayers? Of course they will, they’ll just juggle their books and pass on added costs to both the states, by getting them to cover the cuts in Medicare, and directly to taxpayers, particularly to the younger Obama supporters, through new mandates.

Moreover, forcing insurance companies to take anyone with any pre-condition sounds populist, but what if you only bought your car insurance after you had an accident? How long will insurance companies stay in business? They won’t and that’s where we have another “government rescue” and another fail. Connect the dots on all of Obama’s other big successes.

5) Global Warming Fail. Anthropogenic CO2 makes up about 3.2% of greenhouse gases. The New Zealand atmospheric scientist, Augie Auer, wrote that three-quarters of the earth is ocean, and 95 percent of the greenhouse effect is governed by water vapor.

“Of that remaining 5 percent, only about 3.6 percent is governed by CO2 and when you break it down even further, studies have shown that the anthropogenic (man-made) contribution to CO2 versus the natural is about 3.2 percent.

“So if you multiply the total contribution 3.6% by the man-made portion of it, 3.2%, you find out that the anthropogenic contribution of CO2 to the global greenhouse effect is 0.115 percent … that’s like .12 cents in $100. It’s minuscule … it’s nothing.”

Finally, the Obama administration would like to sacrifice business growth, at an astronomical cost to both the taxpayer and the consumer, while slowing down our economy further, in order to reduce our carbon emissions by 20%. But, it’s not a total waste; he will be satisfying his own left wing base. Assuming the entire world cooperates with Obama’s plan, which it won’t, this initiative will have a negligent effect on Global Warming. Another Obama fail.